


Come Close and Then Even Closer

by anr



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-09
Updated: 2010-11-09
Packaged: 2017-11-05 16:13:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/408419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anr/pseuds/anr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hiatus.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Come Close and Then Even Closer

**Author's Note:**

> _Ghost In The Machine_ (5x05)  
>  "Say When" (The Fray)

_later on_  
if it turns to chaos  
hurricane coming all around us  
see the crack, pull it back from the window  
you stay low 

 

1.

Six months later, he gets her back.

 

2.

"This is your city," she says, later. "Your choice."

He's not going to argue with her. Symbolic or not, whether she agrees or not, this _is_ their decision, their plan. Leaning back into the chair, he drops his hands to the controls.

 

3.

His drones wipe out the tower, the stardrive, the 'jumper bay. McKay tells him after of the Stargate falling, slipping through chunks of the city. The splash was impressive, the steady sink to the bottom of the ocean not so much.

 

4.

They stand on the nearest stable pier and watch the waves sweep over the now-crumbling edges, watch sunlight glitter off shards of glass and chunks of metal. The glare is irritating; he wishes he had sunglasses.

Nobody says what they're thinking.

It's easier that way.

 

5.

It takes two days to cross the city without transporters.

 

6.

They pick one of the outlying spires. It's not as tall as the central tower used to be, but that's kind of the point. McKay wants to use one the ZPMs to repair some of the more advanced systems; he's outvoted easily.

"That is not why we are here," says Teyla.

John says, "Mod con's only, McKay. We agreed."

 

7.

They pick quarters on the top level, removing as many of the internal walls as they can, replacing the externals with glass. When they stand in the centre, after, he can see the city spread out behind them, the ocean to their north, a mostly unobstructed three-sixty view.

"Always knew I'd get a penthouse one day," he says.

Teyla and Ronon do the opposite on the ground floor, adding walls and rooms until they've a warren of corners and hallways that occasionally lead nowhere.

McKay takes three levels in the middle and leaves them exactly as they are.

 

8.

With the essentials covered, they go over the rules again:

I. No advanced technology.  
II. No outside communication.  
III. No means of travel.

The exceptions are:

A. The shield.  
B. The cloak.  
C. The sensors.

 

9.

"Hypothetically," starts McKay, "Stargates..."

Teyla and Ronon's voices join John's, " _no_!"

 

10.

She drifts around their tower, the piers, their corner of the city. She seems lost.

"No," she says. "Not lost. Just --" She shrugs and for a moment he sees her as she used to be. "I know they wouldn't have hurt us, hurt _them_. You could have rescued them too."

He destroyed every body floating around that 'gate after reclaiming hers. Shattered them into frozen, useless flecks. Did it without thinking, without hesitation, without regret. "No," he says. "I couldn't."

 

11.

As a group, they talk a lot at first. Then less. Then not at all.

 

12.

McKay builds a Stargate.

John blows it up.

 

13.

They start talking again.

 

14.

"Do you ever wonder what it would have been like?" she asks him. "If we'd stayed together?"

He nods. Nods and thinks, _every damn day_.

"I'm not sorry," she says. "For any of it. I had to try."

He is. He never should have let them split up in the first place. "It wasn't that I didn't want to _try_ ," he says. "I just wasn't ready to give up. I'm still not."

She looks sad more than angry -- an infinite improvement on the last time they'd had this argument. "Ascension is not failure, John," she says.

He knows it's not, but. "This is better."

 

15.

They take turns monitoring the shield and cloak and sensors, watching for wraith, for replicators, for _Atlantis_.

Their solar system stays quiet.

 

16.

When he wakes up one morning, _Elizabeth_ is standing beside his bed.

"Between you and McKay," he says, knowing he should be mad, _furious_ , "I'm gonna run out of C4 pretty soon."

She laughs.

 

17.

It shouldn't make things easier now that she looks like she should, but it does. His shallowness bothers him until she says, "I couldn't stand it anymore. Call it vanity, or narcissism, or whatever you want, but _this_ is me."

He reaches out and fingers a lock of her hair, watches sunlight play across her skin. She looks very, very real to him right now. "Yes," he says. _Beautiful_ , he thinks. "Yes it is."

 

18.

He _really_ wants to kiss her.

It's probably one of those always-will-want things, though. He lets the moment slide.

 

19.

Elizabeth decides to teach Ronon how to do the backstroke without sinking.

"This would probably be easier," says Elizabeth, "if you'd remove your guns _before_ getting into the water."

Ronon looks confused. "What's the point in learning this if I'm only going to be dead?"

 

20.

After the second lesson, John starts making popcorn for him and Teyla.

 

21.

After the third lesson, McKay brings alcohol.

 

22.

Another Stargate, another explosion.

"It's not like I'm going to _use_ it," says McKay, sulking.

John heals a shrapnel wound on his shoulder, shrugging at the faux-itch. "You're welcome," he says.

 

23.

Elizabeth leans across the table and kisses him.

"You don't know how long I've wanted to do that for," she says, after.

 

24.

They spend a week in another tower. Ronon and Teyla have been working on it for longer than John cares to note, building and rebuilding the levels until it's a maze of debris and dead ends, the ultimate battle zone. He's pretty sure there's half a goddamn tank on the third floor, landmine damage on the twelfth.

"I thought we were on hiatus," says McKay, rewiring a panel. "Isn't this why we're here? Isn't this why we cut ourselves off? So that we wouldn't have to do this?"

Elizabeth shoots over McKay's head at John, winging him. The evil little grin she gives him when he fires back is downright flirty, he thinks.

"We are on hiatus," she says.

 

25.

McKay wins.

Nobody's very surprised.

 

26.

"Did you build the city as soon as we parted?"

 _Parted_. Like they'd simply been at a train or bus station (space station?), her ride going one way, his the other, a casual, _see you later_ , tossed over one shoulder. Like their group of survivors hadn't been sheared in half after the planet exploded and their creators were destroyed, him and McKay and Teyla and Ronon on one side, the others opposite, and her choosing...

"Pretty much," he says.

 

27.

McKay takes up fishing. He's terrible at it, but that just makes him more determined.

John watches him sitting on the edge of the pier, feet and line dangling over the edge, and considers joining him.

 

28.

He makes a set of golf clubs instead.

 

29.

He kisses Elizabeth in the ocean, salt-water on their lips, her body slick against his, realising quickly that it's just as hard to simultaneously stay afloat and make-out now as it had been during his adolescence.

They try their best anyway.

 

30.

There's an accident. He doesn't want to remember details; filters them into a subdirectory he will never, ever access.

"Talk to me?" she asks quietly, eyes closed as she lies on the bed after, her nanites busily working to repair her body. "The silence -- Tell me a story, or something. I don't care."

 _Once upon a time he, she --_ they _had lived._

Once upon a time there was a group of people -- humans -- from a planet called Earth who had their consciousness copied into organic clones. They died.

Once upon a time there was a group of machines who made those same humans into nanite replicas. They survived. They survived, and they escaped the destruction of the replicator homeworld only to realise they had different ideas about what to do now that they were the only nanite-forms left in the galaxy. One took the 'ship and went with a handful of survivors in search of a higher plane of existence upgrade, while the others decided to create their own home and wait for the heat to die down.

Once upon a time we were living in our self-created Atlantis on this planet our human-selves had lived on for three years before they abandoned it. We were only days away from destroying our Stargate -- so that we could wait, undetected and undisturbed, for the day when we could resume kicking wraith ass into oblivion without being considered an enemy in our own right -- when we discovered that you _had been spaced by our human-selves and were out there, drifting, alone..._

He clears his throat. "How do you feel about elephant jokes?"

 

31.

He and Teyla have a race to see who can free-climb the side of one of the towers the fastest.

"Best two out of three," he says, after.

 

32.

"Best three out of five?"

 

33.

Once, Elizabeth recreates _Gone With the Wind_ from memory.

He writes down every dirty limerick he can remember.

McKay turfs out three autobiographies. In hex.

Teyla records songs into their database.

"What?" asks Ronon.

 

34.

He does not make a puddlejumper.

He does, however, find another bay under the pier to their right. He doesn't power any of the half-dozen 'jumpers up, doesn't even go inside, but he does stand in the bay entrance, looking and remembering. He misses flying.

 

35.

The explosion rocks the city.

"Oh, like _you're_ the only one who knows how to use C4," says McKay smugly.

"McKay," he sighs, watching debris from the 'jumper bay float away, " _no Stargates_."

 

36.

When it's storming, he and Elizabeth sit in front of their ocean-facing windows and watch the waves break over the city.

"I told them everything," she says once. "The real yous. _Atlantis_."

He looks at her.

"Well," she amends, " _almost_ everything."

 

37.

They play hide and seek. For ten months.

Ronon cheats.

 

38.

He and Elizabeth take a vacation of their own. Sort of.

They can't leave the city, of course, but they can pretend. They transform one of the lower piers on the opposite side of the city into a beach cove -- sand instead of metal, a forest wall at their backs to hide the spires. It's fake, of course -- the sand is too perfect, the trees scentless and almost uniform -- but the ocean waves are real enough. He kisses her in their created shallows, waves tugging at their shins, shifting them closer together, and _believes_.

 

39.

Elizabeth sighs as she wanders through the debris from another explosion.

"Seriously?" she says. "You two need a new hobby."

 

40.

He and McKay TP Teyla and Ronon's battle-ground spire.

"Not," says Elizabeth, "what I had in mind."

 

41.

A group of wraith scouts appear, their first contact since.

"Please tell me the cloak is still --" John starts.

McKay waves him away. "Yes, yes, we're invisible. Not even here. Relax."

Using the sensors, they watch with undisguised curiosity as the scouts dart over the mainland, scanning. In a high orbit, a hive ship does the same to the planet itself.

"What happens if the darts try flying towards us?" asks Teyla.

"In. Vis. I. Ble," repeats McKay.

Elizabeth crosses her arms. "So, what? They'll just bounce off our shield, think that's totally normal, and carry on?"

There's a moment of silence. McKay looks from the sensor display to Elizabeth to the display again.

John says, "I could submerge the city?"

Ronon's checking his guns. "Don't you need a chair for that?"

"Wait! Wait!" McKay points to the display, finger tracing the paths the darts are making. "They're leaving."

They watch the darts return to the hive, watch the hive disappear. Nobody moves.

 

42.

They make a chair.

"Exception D," McKay says.

 

43.

The whales return for a visit, too. The ghosts and solar flares, thankfully, don't.

"Sam!" says McKay, pointing.

It's impossible to know for sure if it is or isn't, but they let McKay have this one anyway.

"Yes, Meredith," intones John. "There is a Sam." Elizabeth punches him in the arm, beating Teyla by only a few seconds. Backing away from them, he offers his best clueless look. "What?"

Ronon snorts.

 

44.

They don't _need_ to eat, or drink, or even breathe, but old habits -- even habits necessitated by their original human forms -- are hard to break.

"Chocolate," says Elizabeth. "I could handle never again eating meat or vegetables or fruit -- pretty much anything, I guess -- but chocolate?" She shakes her head. "There's just some things you can't survive without."

Nobody points out that none of their food is really _food_. It's the thought that counts.

 

45.

"Why do you call this C4?" asks Teyla. "Your C4 was never able to destroy a Stargate before."

Setting the charges, John nods. "It can't. We're just calling it that 'cause, well. Um."

Teyla hands him another red brick. "Perhaps it is time for a new name, yes?"

 

46.

After the smoke clears, and McKay's temper tantrum tapers off, they all throw in their suggestions.

"And the winner is," says Elizabeth, holding up the bowl for Ronon. John does a drumroll.

Ronon plucks out a scrap of paper. "Nanite-4."

They all groan.

 

47.

Sadly, nobody can agree on a better name.

John reluctantly reprograms the nanites to stamp the explosives _N4_.

 

48.

McKay finally catches a fish. It flops on the end of the line, water droplets spraying his face.

"Help!" he shouts. "What do I do now?"

Elizabeth manages to get a freeze-frame from the database of the fish slapping McKay in the face. It's _awesome_.

 

49.

"Exception E! Exception E!" says McKay, standing in front of a Stargate. " _Please_."

Dropping the bag of N4 at his feet, John shakes his head. "This is your rule, McKay. _Yours_. You better than any of us know that if there's a Stargate, there's a Stargate address. And if there's a Stargate address, there's the chance someone could dial here and _discover us_. You said so yourself! Why --"

"It doesn't have to be turned _on_. I can keep it deactivated. Nobody except us would ever know it's here."

"Again -- _why_? What _possible_ need could you have for a dead Stargate that we couldn't even contemplate using for another fifty years or more?"

McKay looks at him.

 

50.

Elizabeth rolls over when he slips into bed, curling up around her.

"You let him keep it then?" she asks, pressing the words into the space where his neck meets his shoulder.

He smoothes his hand down her back, tugging her closer until she's all that he can feel. He sighs. "No."

The explosion fills the night sky.

 

51.

Teyla teaches Elizabeth how to fight.

Watching them spar, he's pretty sure McKay and Ronon's minds short-circuit about the same time as his.

 

52.

They don't really have birthdays anymore -- bodies bonded from trillions of tiny, tiny nanites do not a birth make -- but old habits, etcetera.

McKay shoves a gaily wrapped box at his chest when he walks into their shield-cloak-sensor room for his monitoring shift. "It's a football," he says with a shrug.

Teyla and Ronon step away from the console behind them, revealing a cake in the shape of a... _something_ , a row of flickering candles crossing the middle. "Surprise," says Ronon unnecessarily.

Elizabeth steps forward and takes his hand, stretching up to press a kiss to his cheek. "Happy Birthday, John," she says, smiling.

"I hate you all," he says, grinning.

 

53.

There's a box full of moonshine sitting on the console chair.

"On the other hand," he says, "hate's a pretty strong word."

 

54.

He finds McKay and Elizabeth down by the water, trying to skip little pieces of metal debris from god-knows-where over the waves.

"What's up?" he asks, joining in.

"McKay and I are talking about making babies," Elizabeth says.

 

55.

He gets a little mad.

 

56.

Then he gets a _lot_ mad.

 

57.

Ronon sits on him until he's calm enough to listen to her again.

"We were just _talking_ , John," she says. "I was telling him about the forms the others were trying to create back on _Atlantis_. We'd never actually --"

He throws Ronon off of him and gets to his feet, leaning in until his face is all but touching hers. "Good," he says coldly, cutting her off. "'Cause the day I have to N4 a fucking _child_ is the day this ends."

 

58.

Nobody mentions it again.

He builds an ARG anyway.

 

59.

"You're different," she says. "From the man I first knew. Harder."

 _I'm a machine now_ , he thinks. _We all are. Harder is just an adjective._ "I know," he says. He knows it's not a change for the better, just the only one he could make at the time. She was gone, and then she wasn't, and he couldn't risk the former again. _Can't_. "I'm sorry."

She waves away his apology. "Don't be." They're sitting in front of their ocean windows, watching another storm roll in, and she lifts one of his hands from where it's resting on her stomach so she can kiss his palm. "I love you for keeping us alive."

 _The only thing true in that statement_ , he thinks, _is the meaning behind it._ But she _does_ mean it, he knows she does, and maybe that's all that matters. "I love you too," he says.

 

60.

On the nth anniversary of their self-imposed exile, they head over to where the command tower used to be. Should be. Maybe will be again, one day.

There's a Stargate wedged between shards of debris, waves sweeping against its curves.

" _McKay_ ," sighs Teyla.

"I know, I know," McKay says. He detonates a series of small charges.

 

61.

They watch the Stargate slip, and fall, and sink.

 

62.

Ronon gets hurt doing something stupid. Ronon gets hurt, and Elizabeth is restless waiting for him to heal. It's just another accident, another thing John probably won't want to remember later, but for now he's okay with it because _Ronon will heal_. They all will. They _always_ will.

"It's not that I want to leave again," she says. "I don't. And I'm not talking about trying to change what we are -- I know our limitations. It's just -- don't you get _frustrated_ sometimes? All our time spent waiting, killing time... making stuff just to blow it up again... I know there's a greater goal, but --"

"I have a list," he says.

 

63.

He has a list.

Elizabeth stops pacing, stops and looks at him. "A list," she repeats.

He nods.

"Of reasons why you like this life."

 _For the most part, yeah._ He nods again.

Crossing her arms, she raises an eyebrow. "What's number one?"

He smiles. 

  


* * *

The End

**Author's Note:**

> ORIGINAL URL: <http://anr.livejournal.com/414348.html>


End file.
